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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

What is C-c? I have never used emacs so these comments are very confusing.

Emacs' notation for keybindings uses C for indicating the Ctrl/Cmd key and M for the Meta (alt).

Things like C-c C-v are chords. <Ctrl+c> and <Ctrl+v>.

I might be wrong, but I believe that the reason that parent commenter said that "C is not Ctrl" is due to the fact that you can map these keys to any where you want. Most emacs and lispers prefer to have C key bound to caps lock.

> I might be wrong, but I believe that the reason that parent commenter said that "C is not Ctrl" is due to the fact that you can map these keys to any where you want. Most emacs and lispers prefer to have C key bound to caps lock.

Yeah, but it's still a control key. I mean, xev literally registers "Control_L" when I press the key that is physically labeled "Caps Lock".

C-c is a chord (two keys pressed at once); C-c C-v is a chord progression (first one chord, then the other), more often referred as a sequence in this context.

Right you are. Using Emacs for 20 years and I still can't get to explain it to people properly.

That just proves OP’s point, imo.

Were this an actual conversation where someone wants to start with emacs, I would be showing the sequences (as in "see, Ctrl-x and Ctrl-f gives you a prompt to write a file. Now try Ctrl-x and Ctrl-s...") and I would show the part of emacs that gives the user feedback about the command.

Discussions about terminology are totally secondary, and honestly, I was just trying to find a polite way to show that I don't want to get into an argument about terminology.

"You have to press these 2 keys at the same time" I don't understand your difficulty.

That's to avoid overstretching your pinky

On an ordinary PC keyboard with sufficient travel, you can use your palm instead of your pinky, and I highly recommend it.

It's the notation for the shortcut Ctrl+c, which would be used in windows to copy and Ctrl+v for paste.

It's written in most emacs documentation as C-c for brevity.

It's usually the Ctrl key, but most emacs users would rebind that. So it's not the Ctrl key.

Some users will rebind it, I don't think we can say "most" unless we have some data to support that.

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